


Lessons From Italy

by Go0se



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Angst and Romance, Backstory, Bookman Clan (D.Gray-man), Character Study, Inspired by Fanart, Multi, No Homophobic Violence, Writing older characters' backstories with my bisexual little hands, mentions of period-typical homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 05:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15066314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: Almost seventy years before Bookman had assumed the guise of an Exorcist of the Black Order, he'd been an apprentice recording a war in Naples. He was nineteen when he fell in love with a boy who’d die in the street.





	Lessons From Italy

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a really cool piece of monochrome-brown art someone made of a young Bookman, which despite my best efforts I can't find any source for, as well as stated above me wanting to write as many characters as bisexual as I can.  
> If anyone reads this speaks and/or is Italian, I apologise for grammar errors and also historical inaccuracies. Please accept some of it as handwave handwave Fantasy 19th Century? _I tried my best_
> 
> Thank you especially to Mross and Froggy for helping me edit this, and Rose for the same and also for being super encouraging. And thank you to you for reading.
> 
> -

Junior was nineteen when he fell in love with a boy who’d die in the street.

It was on the cobblestones of Naples, Italy, where the whirlwind of a revolution would catch everyone in its movement for good or evil. As Bookmen (and apprentice), himself and his mentor were concerned with neither side. They had come to see the results, and had elected for this record to stay as civilians.

His name had been Peter then, to everyone who asked him, save for his mentor who of course knew the truth. She and him had separated on purpose as soon as their boat had landed in the city.  
It was the first time in more than a decade of training that Junior had been trusted to take on a log alone, and he was determined to do it properly.

  
Peter had met Gian Di Napoli days into the recording, about a year before the boy’s death. The revolution against the king had only been whispers then, but it was whispers that Bookmen listened to best. Gian was the son of a butcher whose shop stood right next to the meagre inn where Peter had found a room. Naturally, the two young men saw each other every day.  
At first Gian had simply hawked the macelleria's wares to Peter, from the stoop where he stood sweeping the street's dust and filth away. Then, as he became more aware of Peter's patterns, he started waiting for him, and calling out to him when he saw Peter return from his daily reconnaissances. He’d insist that Peter one day let him show him around town, or ask where he’d been. Gian was, in short, enough of a nuisance to warrant attention.

Peter learned a lot about Gian just from observing for those first few weeks, obviously. The other young man was in some ways a quintessential Italian. Catholic (despite the local stirrings against the Church and crown), loud-spoken, passionate, by all accounts loving to his family and his home, liked well enough in the town. The oldest of six siblings, none with any particular reputation. His parents were generally well thought of. Giovanni was his full name (after John the apostle, ' _God is gracious_ '), but no one called him that except for the local priest. He didn't speak any English but knew some French and Spanish. He had no direct ties to the Carbonari that Peter could find out. His father felt strongly in their favour, but had no status in the loose chain of command among the insurgents.  
In short, the other young man wasn't a threat. Or at least if he was, then Gian himself didn't know it. He was just insistent. Not aggressive nor easily swayed. He kept cajoling Peter to come with him on errands around the city.  
Peter had no idea why the other young man seemed intent on following him. When asked, Gian simply leaned on the handle of his broom and said that Peter was living so close to him it would be rude if they didn’t learn more about each other.

As if Peter didn't have enough to do.

But… he was here to watch and to learn, and most everyone in the neighbourhood passed through the macellaria at least once a week. And the opportunity for Peter to practice his own conversational Italian would be beneficial in the future. Gian would be useful to listen to; a helpful contact.  
Eventually he had agreed to walk with him.

 

On those walks Peter had indeed learned the gossip and political leanings of various families, soldiers, bakers, craftsmen and candlemakers with whom he temporarily shared a street, as he thought he would. He also began to understand more about Gian.  
Gian’s tanned skin and dark hair were from his mother, while the several scars along his hands (which Peter only noticed up close) were from knives that had slipped while he'd been learning his father's trade. He didn't share his father's blazing support of the revolution. Gian cared for the cause-- he wouldn't be called a coward-- but only circumstantially. His real ambitions, he told Peter one day by the sea, were to take over the shop when it was time for his father to pass it on, send his younger brothers through school, and provide his sisters with a generous cassoni each for their weddings when the times came.  
Peter had nodded at the time and asked some leading question, while thinking that was a lot of information to just give out to someone the other young man had only met weeks before.  
But as he was learning, that was part of who Gian was as well: he had no compunction sharing things. 

Gian also apparently had no compunction having his scarred hands on Peter. Not in a way that would raise eyebrows. They were in Italy, after all, and strangers kissed each other's cheeks as a matter of greeting. So perhaps it wasn't as startling as Peter felt it was when, after having known each other for a month and a half and coming back from a promenade around the city, Gian took his face in his hands and kissed him just in front of each of his ears. “Have a good night, Peter,” Gian had said, smiling with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, and he turned his head slightly, offering his own cheek.

Peter knew at this point that Gian considered them friends. As Peter, he was not quite friendly enough to return a cheek kiss, not even from a handsome boy he'd been spending days with.

“Goodnight,” Peter replied. He didn't at all close the space between them, and didn't raise his hands for anything except to open the door to the inn house behind them.

 

Even then. Even then he should have known better than to stay in the same inn. Leaving one part of the city for another part would not have been too difficult of a task. The record itself wouldn't be harmed as long as he was in Naples, and of course, the record was the only important thing.

But Peter had stayed.

 

*

 

Over the next year, Gian's presence had become usual to Peter in the time between when he'd go on investigations or observation outings. The young man had been boisterous and enveloping, at first, but slowly he became friendly, in sometimes surprising ways.  
The first time that Gian had touched him other than to kiss his cheeks hello was under a tree as they'd taken a break from their afternoon stroll. He’d pressed his fingers on Peter’s cheekbone, marvelling at how much more golden-hued Peter's skin was than his own.

It wasn't unusual for people in Naples to see Chinese sailors, Junior knew from studying, but few of them ever ventured this far ashore. As Peter had merely blinked at him, startled but accepting this as just another way for his Italian (temporary) friend to display his own exuberance, Gian had smiled-- maybe a little shyly. The first sign of that in the young man, to be sure.

He'd pulled back and for the rest of the day the two of them went on as though nothing had happened.

But that small moment turned out to be more significant than Peter had imagined at the time. Gian had apparently meant it as a kind of test, and had taken Peter’s surprised acceptance to heart. The other young man started to become bolder. Days later, pressing the pads of his thumbs to the makeup Peter wore under his eyes (as habit) and asking why he took so much time to do such things. Weeks later, he'd steal Peter's hair tie and take off, and after the chasing game had been exhausted he'd run his hand through Peter's fine, long black hair when it hung down around his face.

Whenever this happened Junior repeated to himself again that Italians in general had a culture of easy touch, the men included (much like Persian societies). Nothing else.

So Peter thought nothing of the walks, the hair tie games, the teasing. When Gian started offering him slices of goat's meat free of charge for a lunch meal every so often, he thought nothing of simple kindness.

 

Then arrived one afternoon when Gian invited himself up to Peter's inn room, his arms full of books that Peter had selected from a seller farther up in the city. Gian had quickly taken them from Peter as he’d seen him walking down the road.

Peter had allowed it-- Peter was humble and not averse to help, unlike his previous name-- and the other young man followed him up to his small room on the second floor, placing the books carefully on the bed.

"My father," Gian said as he made sure the volumes were steady, "He doesn't mind the girls reading their magazines, but he could never get me to sit through one of these myself. My brother does all the records for the shop." He stood and turned, smiling. "You're amazing to keep all of that in your head, Peter."

Peter nodded, not to agree but to acknowledge. He thought nothing of politeness and friendly compliments, either. "It's all practice," he replied.

Gian still had that somewhat foolish smile on his face. "Do you do much except study?"  
"I travel," he said simply. He took off his jacket, shaking the dust free, and laid it on the room’s small table next to his brush and facepaints.  
Gian nodded. "With others, yes?"  
"Most of the time."  
"Do you... do much else with others?" Gian's voice had gotten softer and closer.  
Peter looked up. He stilled.  
Gian had stepped up to him, near enough that Junior had alerted, looking for threat. But there was none. Only Gian, hesitating for a moment as he looked to Peter's eyes-- maybe seeing a flicker of the Junior Bookman there-- before he leaned in to meet Peter's mouth with his.  
They kissed, and Peter thought nothing.

Gian had left the room with a quiet goodnight and a promise to see him the next morning.  
Peter watched through the window as the other young man walked home. He realized, with the kind of embarrassing wobble in his lungs that resulted from a mistake too long in the making, that Gian had never said “getting married” was one of his hopes.

 

Junior was not used to people paying such close attention to him. He felt a little embarrassed by it: not Gian’s affection, but the fact of any one of the subjects he was observing paying him attention at all. Bookmen moved like the wind from place to place, not caring anything of where they visited. The places they visited shouldn’t have cared about _them,_ either, if he’d been doing his job right.

This-- Gian-- was a _strong_ red flag. He had hit another point when he should have moved on. Known better than to stay. But Junior was idealistic, still, despite his mentor’s best efforts and teachings. He was proud and over-confident and foolish. He had become attached, though he wouldn’t say it that way.

The morning after Gian had been so uncharacteristically shy, Peter had sought him out at the macelleria. He convinced him to leave his post earlier than normal, brought him to the edge of a field on a bluff overlooking the ocean that was too far to see from the water, and when Gian had asked what was so important, Peter kissed him again. First, this time.

And, still, he stayed.

 

The room in the inn he’d keep until the record was finished was simple. It had a thin bed, a desk, a chair, a window. Peter sat at the desk and wrote his observations into sturdy notebooks daily, using the Bookman Clan’s script as well as a careful code. After nearly ten years of training all of his records were meticulously detailed, drained of blood or passion in his memory, which was unfailing as ever before. (Ironic, considering he would later remember every failure of his own.)   
There were things he left out of the records. Mundane details of course, like where he got food during a regular day or unrelated weather. But beginning with the morning after the other young man had carried Peter’s books to his room, he mostly self-edited Gian.

Not the fact of the other young man’s existence. Instead,  their continued walks together where they discussed nothing relating to the revolution or the other people in the neighbourhood, but did discuss anything else that came to mind. The afternoons of such walks they spent resting under the shade of olive trees. Every single time Gian ‘stole’ Peter’s hair tie and bartered a kiss for it back.   
… the kissing. He left that out in its entirety. It’d been furtive, and then less so as they’d got used to each other; in Peter’s quiet inn room, off the sides of roads, by the sea, between fallow olive trees. They never did more than that. Gian had inclinations to, but Junior himself was just as inclined to keep at least that much distance between them. It wasn’t that he was bashful, either, although explaining it that way helped Gian understand. It was a concession to proper Bookman objectivism that Peter had otherwise, with Gian, ignored.

Some caution was warranted anyway. Hidden as they usually were in tall grasses and groves, or private rooms, kissing could be quick and easily hidden. Anything further would be more difficult. The rich in Naples and abroad had a tendency to treat certain nearby islands as their own playgrounds, and there were sections of the city where two young men could have gone and no one would have looked twice in their direction as long as it was after dark, but both of them knew that danger remained nonetheless. To the people in their neighbourhood, it was all very suitable for artists and sailors and travellers to be interested in other men, as they were mostly out of sight and probably degenerates of other kinds to begin with; but to have such a person among themselves would be different. Gian could very well be killed. Or at the very least, ostracized, which in a way was the worse punishment. Peter knew that.  
Maybe Gian thought the same of Peter, although Junior had no doubts that Bookman would retrieve him before such a thing ever happened. He never mentioned his mentor to Gian, though, and the other young man never asked. As far as Gian knew, Peter had come to the city alone.

Peter was content with Gian knowing that. Content being with Gian. He wanted to keep the time they had to himself; and so it stayed out of his notebooks.

  
Intentionally abandoning details wasn’t something a Bookman did. It would be a disgrace to the Clan and to their purpose. Peter knew that. He could reason it away to himself, though. He certainly had before. It had happened twice previously, this lapse in Junior’s judgement. A farmer girl in Manchuria three names and nearly four years past, and a boy who’d been drafted into the French army when he and Junior had barely grown into adolescence. It had always been an unexpected development, and then a secret that Junior had kept as long as he could.

He had spun reasons for himself in those earlier times, and he well did now, all throughout that autumn and into the long winter. 

Surely there’d be no harm to the record if he stayed. If he spent days or so not seeking out information but floating in it, if that information was another person. Surely Gian’s presence would not be missed in the record in such details. He couldn’t create a bias in Junior’s records, because after all, it was _Peter_ that Gian was paying attention to. Not Bookman Junior, who would move on from this place as soon as he had seen whatever was going to happen.  
Peter who’d walked with Gian around the city and countryside enough his feet instinctively followed the way, listening to the stories Gian told and gave (vague) recounts of his own travels in return. Peter who had passed the time playing catch with Gian using pits of wild olives after they had eaten the fruit. Who had shared lunches with him by the docks. Who’d read to him on the dusty stoop on particularly slow days at the macelleria. Who had kissed him.  
Peter who was a sheet left to cover an empty window; a cloth mask perfectly fitted to the face. A cover story.  
A story which had an ending.

 

*

 

During the winter, the revolution's whispers had quickly became a roar. The Holy Alliance hadn't wanted to let the briefly established monarchy stand; and so in February that year they had sent out an army. Blood and bodies had filled the streets. The rebellion was crushed, its leaders imprisoned, killed or lost without a trace. 

Peter had stood back untouched by it all, making notes in his records. He'd kept his distance right up until he had made his way back to the inn and the butcher shop beside it.

He had frozen at the top of the familiar street, eyes wide despite himself.

 

It was clogged with people. The Alliance had spared no shadow of the city, and Peter had known that, he’d _known,_ but-- it was different to see it.

There, in the gutters of the road, laid almost every working man who Peter had watched toil and live along the neighbourhood in the past year. Soldiers and bakers and craftsmen and candlemakers, many barely more than boys.  Gian's father and three brothers were among them. Gian himself, too. His handsome face had blood all down the front of it, like he'd been cracked in the forehead with the blunt end of a gun. His father and brother bore similar marks and similar stains.  
All five of them were dead.

The women of the neighbourhood were all outside as well, screaming their grief. Some had collapsed next to their men, while others cradled the bodies, or tried to treat the wounded. Some only clutched at each other's shoulders and wept, like they were steadying each other in a boat on a forsaken sea. A few women were bringing out sheets and blankets and tarps from houses, makeshift slings to carry the dead.

Peter should have continued on. He had seen everything he was there to see. Instead, despite himself a second time, he went to them.  
He kneeled in the muck beside a woman who had rolled her sleeves up past her elbows, which were now coated in blood. (She was Elena, the painter's wife, talented in her own right and now a widow.) “Ma’am, I can help,” he told her, and his Italian didn’t tremble, though he felt his shoulders shaking minutely. “Please.”

She paused in her work to look towards him, her expression tight and furious from grief. What did she see in his face? An outsider most likely; which he was, which he should have been more of. It wasn’t becoming of a Bookman to involve himself in his record’s struggles like this. He shouldn’t’ve been offering any assistance at all.  
But he had, and so she nodded. “Over there,” she said curtly, pointing. “Give him bandages.”  
He had followed her reddened hand and quickly set to work. 

 

The clean-up of the massacre had been long and tiresome, but not enough to entirely bury his feelings. Peter had gotten back to his room at the inn late enough into the night that it was almost morning, exhausted and filthy, and had fallen into his bed.  
Sleep hadn’t come. Instead he’d wept fiercely for hours into the straw-filled pillow, aching from the inside out.

  
*

 

Junior had woken up with the tear tracks dried on his face, his head full of dust. By the light in the sky it had already passed noon. Someone, he knew immediately, was in the room with him.  
He'd turned over on the blankets to see his mentor standing beside the closed door.

Bookman's appearance had changed from almost a year in the sun: her fine black hair lightened, her skin slightly darker and further lined. She fit in more comfortably here than Peter had; but that was of no matter to her. Members of their Clan had no creed or country. They belonged with everyone and to nowhere at once, and they always blended in.  
She was watching him silently. Her eyes were clear and full of knowledge, and her voice was exactly as neutrally calm as it had been a year ago. “Tell me everything,” she said.  
Swallowing to clear his dry throat, Junior did.

 

When he'd finished she said nothing for a moment, just continued looking at him.

Shame welled up sharply in his chest under her scrutiny. There was nothing he could say to excuse his behaviour and he knew it. A Bookman talked to all kinds of people and then moved on like they were never there; they didn't weep over broken faces left in the street. Junior flicked his eyes back to his knees under the blankets, feeling the puffiness of his face, disappointed and disgusted in himself.

 

A handkerchief abruptly appeared in his field of vision. Startled, he looked up.

His mentor was holding the folded square of fabric out to him. After he took it instinctively, she moved from standing beside the bed to lean on the windowsill, looking out over the alleyway and the still-quiet street beyond it. “You're still learning,” she said after a moment. “It's expected to lead to this kind of thing at times. You can use that.”

Whether she meant the experience or the handkerchief, Junior wasn't sure. Maybe both.  
Whatever the case, she was giving him space to pull himself together, he realized. Gratitude and relief joined the shame curdling his stomach. “We’ll be leaving?” He asked to the handkerchief. “The record is over?”

“Yes.”

That meant he could really let Peter go. A tenseness went out of his shoulders. For the first time in an almost twelve hours, he pulled himself upright.

 

Junior cleaned his face, changed from his blood-spattered clothes into the cleanest ones he had, and put on his clan earrings for the first time in nearly a month. Gian had-- Junior’s hands shook very slightly, but he steadied himself. Gian had recommended he take them out to avoid the attention of streetside bandits. The hoops stung as he reset them, small droplets of blood staining his fingers. Even properly set they weighed heavily. Their movements were unfamiliar even after so short a time without them.

In a way he was glad for it. They marked him as an apprentice, reminded him why he was here. Really here.

 

He and Bookman walked down to the ports together. The grieving of the city quickly became the noise of sailors, merchants, birds, dock workers and above all the waves. Wisps of cloud covered the sun.

 

It was only when they were in a boat setting sail for France that Bookman spoke again. “There were explosions in the city this morning,” she said.  
Junior looked over at her from the railing of the ship, having briefly lost his concentration in the movements of the sea. “Yes,” he said.  
“Do you know what they might be from?” It wasn't an idle question.  
Junior nodded. His earrings rattled back and forth. “Insurgents are a possibility. Akuma are likely also. So many sudden deaths lead to grief.” He mostly said it without inflection, not thinking of a bright face cracked against the pavement. That was behind him now; Peter didn't exist. He had to move on. She had taught him as much.  
“Good.” That was all that she asked. Bookman went silent, then, in the way that Bookmen often did; contemplatively. Junior looked back at the sea, quiet as well.

 

Silence was useful except when it gave too much time to think.

Junior didn't know if he regretted Peter, as the boat rocking underneath their feet lulled him into a kind of stupor. On one level, by all rights, he knew he should have; but on another, wouldn't regret itself be an admission of weakness?  
Peter had been what he was supposed to be, a vessel which Junior now cast off, ready to start again somewhere new. His feelings for... about Gian were irrelevant. Properly, they never should have existed to begin with. They hadn't, in a way.  
What does wind feel for the places it visits and then leaves without a trace? Nothing at all.

 

*

 

Back in the ancient halls of the Bookman clan's ancestral home, he logged his time in Italy on the same dry parchment he’d catalogued all of his other past personas. He wrote Gian's name down only once in his record of the revolt. _Italian butcher's son; age 19; death by trauma to cranium from Holy Alliance rifle, February 1821_.

Three lines in ink. And that was all he was.

Junior had let his pen rest slightly too long on the end of the sentence, and when he'd lifted it again a blotch had formed over the end of the page. _Foolish._ He pulled the page out of the notebook and threw it onto the floor, starting again.

 

When he finally perfected the record he took it to his mentor, who was sitting in a discussion in the archive room.

In the clan’s home every room was a record room, but the archives were different. Oceans of paper unredacted, collected and categorized. Even standing in them was sometimes overwhelming for newer members. It was not a fear that was eased by the number of fully-fledged Bookmen who frequented the place.

His own mentor paused in her conversation when he came into the room. She looked his record for a moment and then nodded, passing it back to him. “That will do.”

“Thank you,” Junior said. He inclined his head slightly, then matched her gaze again.

 

There was a moment he could recognize when she expected him to leave, and when he didn’t, she raised her eyebrows expectantly.

He shuffled the record to the crook of one of arms and stood with them respectfully at his sides. “I think it would be helpful to the logs if I learned a practice,” he said. It was a request, but it wouldn’t help to frame it that way.

She looked at him for a long moment, just as she had uncountable times before during his apprenticeship. He was once again forced to reckon with just how long Bookman knew him; over a decade, through all the layers of the names he’d had.

This was frustrating on a couple levels. For one, he shouldn’t’ve had anything about him to be known, not really. He was _going_ to become a Bookman, and Bookmen were nameless; there shouldn’t be _anything_ about them to understand except for the Oaths. That was what all this training was for. And more than that, he didn’t _want_ to be understood right then, he just wanted an answer.

Of course, he knew that Bookman probably understood that, too.

 

“What kind of practice, Junior?” Another nearby Bookman asked. She was much older than Junior’s mentor and had a permanently grizzled look about her thanks to the scars all along her face. She had put down her articles, interested.

Junior cleared his throat. “Medicine,” he said. “Something easily applied in the field.”

He wasn’t asking to be a specialized surgeon or a general practitioner, although there were Bookmen who were those things. His mentor had already schooled him in a passing knowledge in applied medicine, from emergency first aid to midwifery, but not a specialty.

The other Bookman nodded, and then looked at Junior’s mentor.

“I think that would be useful as well,” she said finally. It was a kindness. “What were you thinking of practicing?”

Junior opened and closed his mouth. That, he had no idea. He hadn’t quite thought that far; only had been unable to shake the memory of so much blood under his hands. (Just the principle. Not Gian in particular. Not his strong forehead cracked open by a gun.) He floundered for a second, keeping it off of his expression.

A third Bookman who sat nearby spoke up. “He could be a skilled acupuncturist, if he applied himself.” He was older still than the other two, his grey hair and eyebrows having gone entirely white in sudden jumps between when Junior had returned to the clan’s halls, like a portrait being slowly painted over.

Junior’s mentor looked at her peer and nodded, then turned back to her apprentice. “Is that something you’d want to do?”

Relief sank into Junior’s bones. He would still become a Bookman, of course, and they must remain impartial, but at least he would be doing _something._ “It is,” he said.

"Alright. We'll begin your training for it the next time we return then."

The older Bookmen nodded at his mentor approvingly and went back to their studies.

 

Later, his mentor spoke to him privately. They were on their way to her personal research room, him walking beside her carrying an armful of ledgers.

“I know the last record was difficult for you,” she said. She held up a hand as he turned, nerves in his gut and a denial at the start of his throat. “Listen. Worthwhile lessons are often difficult, but they’re vital to you nonetheless. To all of us." She paused. "As I said, you're still learning. Lapses in judgement are understandable."

Her tone was bland, even neutral, but shame welled up Junior's throat like remembered tears. He resisted the urge to apologize for his behavior. Bookman hated interruptions.

"Your observations were still acceptable," she continued after a moment. "Given that, I trust that you will put this behind you. It's imperative you must not let emotions distract you from our true purpose. You're an apprentice to a Bookman; we have no attachments, no loyalties, to anyone but the Clan, and to history itself. We do not deviate from that. Do you understand?”

Junior nodded; his apprentice earrings felt heavy.

“Good.” She held his gaze for a moment, and then smiled slightly. “You did well.”

The praise was unexpected. His back straightened in surprise, and then pride. “I-- thank you, m’am.”

 

Bookman nodded in acknowledgment. They had reached her research room.  She opened the door and allowed him to follow inside.

The low-ceilinged room was stuffy and cramped but familiar enough to be comforting to him. Almost fourty years of research lined the shelves in meticulously  kept order, all written in his mentor'a hand. When he was younger it'd filled him with a more personal awe than the rest of the halls did; he'd nearly gotten lost among the records many times, inhaling information as quickly as he could.

Now he only stood and waited.

Bookman lit the glass lantern on the table in rhe middle of the room and sat down, pulling more papers towards herself as she did. Without looking up she began her instructions.  “Now, put those sequentially from oldest to most recent and ordered by geographical area. When you’re finished, return to me. We'll be leaving for the next record in three days and we have preparations to make."

“Yes,” Junior agreed. moving swiftly over to the shelves and beginning his work.

He put Gian’s face out of his mind and out of the center of his chest (that did not still twinge at the name), and focused on the future.

-


End file.
